OUR preoccupation with the tragic sufferings of the people of Palestine began years before we were able to hoist the flag of our own freedom. One of the many consequences of this protracted emotional engagement with the Palestinians and Al Quds has been a tradition of knowing in considerable detail the dynamics at work in that unhappy, perpetually occupied, land.

Resentment in Pakistan at a poorly-conceived, officially-backed public relations campaign to present Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza as a sea-change in Israel was rooted in this awareness. The people of Pakistan simply knew better than to applaud a tactical move which could be reversed at any time.

Less than 10 months later, the Israeli armour is bearing down on Gaza. The action began with the destruction of a power station plunging the majority of people in untold hardship. This is not war; it is collective punishment, an indispensable part of the repertoire of tricks with which Israel periodically reduces the Palestinians to a sub-human existence.

Every outrage against the Palestinians from Deira Yassin on April 10, 1948, in which three terrorist gangs, Irgun, Stern and Hagana, each led by the founding fathers of the state of Israel, carried out a planned massacre, to the Sharon-sanctioned mass murder at Sabra and Shatila in Beirut on September 14-16, 1982, has had a clear motive. It is to demoralise the victims and persuade them that they have no option but to leave that land that has been theirs for more than a millennium.

Our young journalists and TV presenters incessantly ask their guests why Israel has resorted to such an utterly disproportionate response to the kidnapping of one Israeli soldier. Hostage-taking is the scourge of our time and there is no justification for it. But elsewhere, the drama it unleashes — often intense and tragic — portrays a different scenario. In Israel, which for all practical purposes exists outside international law, a similar crisis has to be understood in a larger framework. Even as world statesmen and Arab states, including Egypt, work tirelessly to recover the Israeli prisoner alive, Israel raises the ante by the hour.

Israel’s defence minister Amir Peretz, by no means a product of the Likud, concedes the possibility of a diplomatic breakthrough for the soldier, Gilad Shalit, as Israel and Arabs try to establish, in his words, “the rules of conduct between us and the Palestinian terror organisations.” He does not indicate if these rules would provide a safeguard against the kind of Israeli strike that killed seven members of an Arab family doing nothing more than picnicking on a beach front favoured by the Palestinians. Nor does he counsel restraint pending the working out of these new rules of conduct. There is not a word about seizing eight ministers of Palestine as hostages. Inevitably, one looks for an explanation beyond the kidnapping of a single Israeli soldier.

The last nine and a half months have been eventful. Israel and its western supporters had long lamented the absence of democracy in the institutions of the Palestinian Authority. A people whose level of awareness is always a cut above the rest of the region because of education and the poignancy of their forlorn situation, the Palestinians held a universally acclaimed free election and brought Hamas to power. The result was denounced in Israel and across the Atlantic as the victory of “a terrorist organization”. Israel lost no time to remind the United States that it still did not have a dialogue partner on the Arab side and that the Hamas government would have to be humiliated and starved into submission, if not self-liquidation.

Many of us challenged this self-serving view of Hamas by arguing that its electoral triumph would inevitably bring a new mellowness and maturity to the organisation and that it should be expected to move gradually to a two-state solution. It would have been naove to assume that Israel would facilitate such a desirable transformation by injecting flexibility in its own attitudes.

In fact, quite the reverse happened. Huge pressure was exerted on Hamas, which could only strengthen its uncompromising ideological hardcore that has opposed Fatah for years for being too accommodative of Israeli expansionism. A well-orchestrated campaign was launched to create a rift between President Mahmoud Abbas and the Hamas government. If all this was not enough, Israel kept up the target killings with the obvious calculation that Hamas would eventually be provoked into abandoning its 16-moth old ceasefire. Deaths on the beach finally brought about that event.

There have been equally seminal developments on the Israeli side too. They revolve around one particular fact of the Middle East scene. Ever since the Clinton-sponsored Camp David talks, Israel has fought shy of a negotiated peace process out of an instinctive fear that any talks, be they under the rubric of the Quartet’s roadmap or the agency of the United States, would make further land grabs more difficult. This is why Israel protests all the time that there is no interlocutor amongst the Arabs to negotiate with.

So absurd is this contention that even President Bush, who gave a conditional green signal to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s convergence plan in Washington, the other day reminded him that Israel should first try negotiating with Mahmoud Abbas. Olmeret’s team indicated that this advice could condition Israeli diplomacy till the end of this year beyond which Israel would be free to act unilaterally. The return of Israel’s army to Gaza will reduce the negotiations in the remaining six months of the year to marginal importance as the focus would shift to preventing or easing up this new occupation.

What must not be lost sight of is the coincidence between the threatened reconquest of the Gaza Strip and the progress between President Mahmoud Abbas and the Hamas leadership on moving towards a two-state solution with an implicit dilution of Hamas’s traditional insistence on a single democratic homeland for Muslims, Jews and Christians.

This prospect would have sent alarm bells ringing in two camps. First, the Israeli hawks, who are now determined to evade a negotiated solution and determine Israel’s frontiers unilaterally by annexing more of the West Bank, would like to destroy this agreement in its infancy. Secondly, there are splinter groups amongst the Palestinians that pursue an even more radical agenda and believe in an eternal struggle to right the wrong done to them in 1948-49.

We are not sure as yet about who has again been firing the Qassam rockets into Israel. But there has never been any doubt that the Middle East peace process has to advance further in the midst of random acts of violence by the state of Israel, its settlers and the extremist groups amongst the Palestinians. Thirty-nine years of continuous occupation cannot possibly provide an ideal setting for peace talks, entirely free of such irritants.

Israels decisions at the moment are clearly subordinate to the national strategy of convergence and unilateral demarcation of Israel’s frontiers after annexing some 10 per cent of what is left of the West Bank. There is speculation in upper-end Israeli media outlets that an occupation of Gaza would make future disengagement more difficult. For one thing, the settlers will see in it the need to hold on to every inch of the colonies. This is a valid point except that Israel needs time in any case to fulfil the American condition of some kind of a dialogue with President Mahmoud Abbas.

It also needs time to prepare for convergence in its characteristically thorough manner. In the case of Jerusalem , a fair gap between the city and a large Jewish settlement has to be built up before outright annexation takes place. Meanwhile, Gaza will provide a useful distraction. Already the main focus of the major players gathered in St. Petersburg is to urge restrain so that the crisis can be contained. It will be interesting to see the precise formulation on the Middle East and on the Quartet’s roadmap that comes out of the G-8 summit. In the minefield in which Palestinians and Israelis fight for secure homelands, there will be unexpected detonations from time to time. This is no different from the winding down and eventual resolution of other freedom struggles in the 20th century. What complicates the Palestinian issue is the huge imbalance between Washington’s support for Israel in and out of season and what the rest of the international community can do to promote an equitable two-state solution. Once again the Israeli press has carried reports of US officials in Israel indicating in advance an understanding of the blatantly disproportionate response to an incident, which, however, reprehensible, was isolated and limited in its impact.

In the worst case scenario, the Hamas government may conceivably collapse under mounting pressures. But would that be a gain? History bears testimony that such protracted conflicts end only when the representatives chosen and acclaimed by the people become a party to a settlement. Transforming a vast majority of Palestinians into “rejectionists” by destroying the government and the institutions put in place by them can only be counter-productive.

Worse still, it may point to malafides, the eternal source of the grist for the mills of the conspiracy theorists. The arrest by Israel of 64 Hamas activists — eight of whom are members of the cabinet and no less than 20 members of their parliament — will bring much hope to what goes by the generic name of Al Qaeda. This is the stuff that an eternal jihad is made of. Is this what the international community wants?

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Email: tanvir.a.khan@gmail.com

SINCE September 11, 2001, newspaper editors in the United States have faced excruciating choices in covering the government’s efforts to protect the country from terrorist agents.

Each of us has, on a number of occasions, withheld information because we were convinced that publishing it could put lives at risk. On other occasions, each of us has decided to publish classified information over strong objections from our government.

Last week, our newspapers disclosed a secret Bush administration programme to monitor international banking transactions. We did so after appeals from senior administration officials to hold the story. Our reports — like earlier press disclosures of secret measures to combat terrorism — revived an emotional national debate, featuring angry calls of “treason” and proposals that journalists be jailed, along with much genuine concern and confusion about the role of the press in times like these.

We are rivals. Our newspapers compete on a hundred fronts every day. We apply the principles of journalism individually as editors of independent newspapers. We agree, however, on some basics about the immense responsibility the press has been given by the inventors of the country.

Make no mistake, journalists have a large and personal stake in the country’s security. We live and work in cities that have been tragically marked as terrorist targets. Reporters and photographers from both of our papers braved the collapsing towers of the World Trade Centre to convey the horror to the world. We have correspondents today alongside troops on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others risk their lives in a quest to understand the terrorist threat; Daniel Pearl of the Wall Street Journal was murdered on such a mission. We, and the people who work for us, are not neutral in the struggle against terrorism.

But the virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature, is directed not just against our people and our buildings. It is also aimed at our values, at our freedoms and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate. If freedom of the press makes some Americans uneasy, it is anathema to the ideologists of terror.

Thirty-five years ago, in the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote: “The government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people.”

As that sliver of judicial history reminds us, the conflict between the government’s passion for secrecy and the press’ drive to reveal is not of recent origin. This did not begin with the Bush administration, although the polarisation of the electorate and the daunting challenge of terrorism have made the tension between press and government as clamorous as at any time since Justice Black wrote.

Our job, especially in times like these, is to bring our readers information that will enable them to judge how well their elected leaders are fighting on their behalf, and at what price.

In recent years our papers have brought you a great deal of information the White House never intended for you to know - classified secrets about the questionable intelligence that led the country to war in Iraq, about the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, about the transfer of suspects to countries that are not squeamish about using torture, about eavesdropping without warrants.

As Robert G. Kaiser, associate editor of the Washington Post, asked recently in that newspaper: “You may have been shocked by these revelations, or not at all disturbed by them, but would you have preferred not to know them at all? If a war is being waged in America’s name, shouldn’t Americans understand how it is being waged?”

Government officials, understandably, want it both ways. They want us to protect their secrets, and they want us to trumpet their successes. A few days ago, Treasury Secretary John Snow said he was scandalised by our decision to report on the bank-monitoring programme. But in September 2003, the same Secretary Snow invited a group of reporters — from our papers, the Wall Street Journal and others — to travel with him and his aides on a military aircraft for a six-day tour to show off the department’s efforts to track terrorist financing. The secretary’s team discussed many sensitive details of their monitoring efforts, hoping they would appear in print and demonstrate the administration’s relentlessness against the terrorist threat.

How do we, as editors, reconcile the obligation to inform with the instinct to protect?

Sometimes the judgments are easy. Our reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, take great care not to divulge operational intelligence in their news reports, knowing that in this wired age, it could be seen and used by insurgents.

Often the judgments are painfully hard. In those cases, we cool our competitive jets and begin an intensive deliberative process.

The process begins with reporting. Sensitive stories do not fall into our hands. They may begin with a tip from a source who has a grievance or a guilty conscience, but those tips are just the beginning of long, painstaking work. Reporters operate without security clearances, without subpoena powers, without spy technology. They work, rather, with sources who may be scared, who may know only part of the story, who may have their own agendas that need to be discovered and taken into account. We double-check and triple-check. We seek out sources from different points of view. We challenge our sources when contradictory information emerges.

Then, we listen. No article on a classified programme gets published until the responsible officials have been given a fair opportunity to comment. And if they want to argue that publication represents a danger to national security, we put things on hold and give them a respectful hearing. Often, we agree to participate in off-the-record conversations with officials so they can make their case without fear of spilling more secrets onto our front pages.

Finally, we weigh the merits of publishing against the risks of publishing. There is no magic formula, no neat metric for either the public’s interest or the dangers of publishing sensitive information. We make our best judgment.

When we come down in favour of publishing, of course everyone hears about it. Few people are aware when we decide to hold an article. But each of us, in the last few years, has had the experience of withholding or delaying stories when the administration convinced us that the risk of publication outweighed the benefits. Probably the most discussed instance was the New York Times’ decision to hold its article on telephone eavesdropping for more than a year, until editors felt that further reporting had whittled away the administration’s case for secrecy.

But there are others. The New York Times has held articles that, if published, might have jeopardised efforts to protect vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear material, and articles about highly sensitive counter-terrorism initiatives that are still in operation. In April, the Los Angeles Times withheld information about American espionage and surveillance activities in Afghanistan, discovered on computer drives purchased by reporters in an Afghan bazaar.

It is not always a matter of publishing an article or killing it. Sometimes we deal with the security concerns by editing out gratuitous detail that lends little to public understanding but might be useful to the targets of surveillance. The Washington Post, at the administration’s request, agreed not to name the specific countries hosting secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons, deeming that information not essential for American readers. The New York Times, in its article on National Security Agency eavesdropping, left out some technical details.

Even the banking articles, which the president and vice-president have condemned, did not dwell on the operational or technical aspects of the programme but on its sweep, the questions about its legal basis and the issues of oversight.

We understand that honourable people may disagree with any of these choices - to publish or not to publish. But making those decisions is the responsibility that falls to editors, a corollary to the great gift of our independence. It is not a responsibility we take lightly. And it is not one we can surrender to the government. — Dawn/Los Angeles Times Service

Dean Baquet is editor of the Los Angeles Times. Bill Keller is executive editor of the New York Times.

THE oppressive heat in Karachi with humidity hovering around the 68 degree mark has made it increasingly difficult for the average householder to get through the day, and at times the night.

Everybody one meets says it’s the hottest summer they’ve known and that the performance of the KESC has dropped to its lowest ebb. The only people who appear to be benefiting from the soaring temperatures and who are laughing all the way to the bank are the chaps who sell generators. Even the generator repair men are doing a roaring business and are now meeting clients by appointment.

The bad news is that next year it will probably be that little bit hotter. Blame it on global warming, President Bushs infinite reluctance to implement the Kyoto protocols in full and the inability of scientists to discover a viable alternative to the use of fossil fuels. Whatever the reason, our rulers appear to have decided that in the race for the production of greenhouse gases they are not going to be outdone. And so, after depriving the people of electricity and water they have now decided to deprive them also of fresh air. What other explanation can there be for the systematic wholesale destruction of trees — nature’s bounty — in different parts of the land?

Trees have been chopped down all over the country at regular intervals from the day the star and crescent was first hoisted over Flagstaff House. They have been scraped off the mountains and the valleys in the north for firewood and elsewhere for making furniture. The sad part is replanting has not always taken place with the result that huge ecological imbalances have been produced.

However, the Karachi chapter of the slaughter took place a few years ago when a functionary of the city government had read in a pamphlet that eucalyptus trees were harmful to the human race and therefore had to be eliminated. And so row after row of tall eucalyptus trees, their sleek silver bark pointing proudly upward towards the sky, came under the axe.

Now, the eucalyptus tree might not be as beautiful as the peepul, the palm, the pine or the sturdy oak, but it certainly has its utility. In the hill station in India where our school was located we burned the leaves of the eucalyptus to chase away mosquitoes, and years later, as technological advances were made, we learned that the leaves were crushed and firmly pressed together into coils — to achieve the same purpose.

The felling bug quickly spread to other parts of the country and was given an impetus when 600 trees were cut down in Mianwali. The usual noises were made by a few environmentalists, but the axes nevertheless swung into action. It was a little different in Lahore where there was a severe reaction to the proposal to cut down 5,000 trees along the Lahore canal to widen a road. But then, the people of Lahore have always loved their trees.

This writer remembers an occasion when he visited the garden city. It was a long time ago. He doesn’t remember the month or even the year, but he does remember the fact that he happened to be sitting in the office of the editor of The Pakistan Times, when an office boy brought in a sack of letters. This was long before computers, e-mail and courier services had been introduced into the country and people communicated by long hand. Two days before, the newspaper had carried a story that the provincial government announced that the site it had selected for the high court building necessitated the chopping down of a number of tall trees. The news touched all sections of Lahore society and the reaction was tremendous.

One woman who was in her eighties wrote that she wept when she heard the news. She said that the trees had been there when she was a child and had been planted around the time of the coronation of King George the Fifth. She pointed out that some of the trees were even older. Another writer said that the trees were a national treasure and chopping them down was like defacing a part of our history.

There was one letter in particular which stood out from the rest. After expressing the usual outrage and suggesting various punishments that should be meted out to the people who took such dreadful decisions, the writer reproduced the short poem entitled Trees crafted by the American poet Alfred Joyce Kilmer on February 2, 1913. In a sense it says it all.

‘I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree/A tree whose hungry mouth is prest/Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast/A tree that looks at God all day/And lifts her leafy arms to pray/A tree that may in Summer wear/A nest of robins in her hair/Upon whose bosom snow has lain/ Who intimately lives with rain/Poems are made by fools like me/But only God can make a tree.’

In Switzerland there is a law that strictly forbids people from cutting down a tree on a mountain. If, however, a citizen happens to be a compulsive feller and can’t kick the habit, he has to plant three trees in its place and is required to look after the saplings for three months. There are similar laws in other countries. Unfortunately, nothing of the sort appears to exist in Pakistan except in housing societies managed by the military.

Fortunately, the current drama being enacted in Lahore appears to have taken a favourable turn. The chief justice of Pakistan has taken suo moto notice of the proposed felling of thousands of trees and the decimation of 60 acres of public park land along the Lahore canal for widening the road. Members of the ‘Save Lahore’ movement have requested the chief justice to allow citizens an opportunity to present alternative, sustainable development solutions to the traffic management and urban development issues facing the city.

What has emerged out of this sordid plan is the news that the widening of the road has little to do with traffic and that the plan is part of a much larger scheme to commercialise residential premises along the canal drive, as has been done in Gulberg and Model Town. When will this crass commercialisation stop? When will the authorities realise that trees and parks are the lungs of the city, and essential to life and that it is time a law was passed to protect our national assets?